Chapter II.

Influence of Popery on the Individual Man.

The important question next presents itself, What is the INFLUENCE of
this system? The system, we have shown, tried by the standard of Scripture
and the test of reason, is thoroughly evil. Is the influence which it exerts
also evil? This is a curious and a most important inquiry. It opens up
a wide field, which, like some that have gone before it, we must hastily
traverse, selecting only the more prominent of the proofs and evidences,
and indicating rather than fully illustrating them. The subject resolves
itself into three branches:--I. The influence of Romanism on the individual
man. II. Its influence on Government. III. Its influence on society.

We shall confine ourselves to the first of these in the present chapter,--the
influence of Romanism on the individual man. Religion is by far the most
powerful agent that can act on man, and that for the following reasons.
In the first place, its objective truths and its impelling motives infinitely
transcend all others; and it is a law, not less in the moral than in the
natural world, that the greatest effect must flow from the greatest
force. In the second place, with religion is bound up man's own
most important interests. Other departments of knowledge are speculative,
or at best touch only the interests of time; but religion bears upon the
entire of man's destiny. In the third place, it puts in motion the faculties
of man in their natural order. As a moral being, man's moral sense is the
moving faculty within him, and the intellectual powers are but its ministers
and helps. Now, religion acts on the conscience, and the conscience calls
into play the understanding, the affections, and the memory. In this way
the mental powers act with the most ease and vigour, because this is their
natural and healthful action. It is the action of life, not the action
of spasmodic or galvanic effort. In the fourth place, religion acts
soonest upon the mind. A child can feel its relations to God, and have
its judgment and memory exercised about these relations, long before it
is capable of a mental act in any other department of human knowledge.
But for its religious exercises, which are always the earliest mental efforts
of the child, years of intellectual dormancy would pass away, and when
they came to an end, the child would bring to other subjects untrained
and comparatively feeble powers. Besides, whatever makes the first,
coeteris paribus, makes also the deepest impression upon
the mind. In the fifth place, religion acts most frequently upon
the mind. In early life especially, questions of duty must be of hourly
occurrence. The decision of these questions involves the exercise of the
reasoning powers. This is favourable to mental activity, and mental activity
begets mental vigour. In the last place, religion acts upon the greatest
number. Science, politics, and other subjects, have each their chosen
disciples, but religion embraces all; for where is the rational being who
cannot feel the force of its motives, and the extent to which his highest
interests are involved in it? On all these grounds, we do not hesitate
to affirm that religion, both as a motive power and as a moulding agent,
wields over man, whether viewed individually or socially, an influence
of such universal and resistless energy, that, compared with it, all other
agencies are insignificant and powerless. Emphatically it is religion,--keeping
out of view at present the unequal advantages of birth and of mental endowment,--it
is religion that determines the social place and the terrestrial destiny
of a man; it is religion that determines the social place and the terrestrial
destiny of a nation. But we have already proved that Popery is opposed
to Scripture, and contradicts reason. In the proportion in which it does
so it is not religion; and in the proportion in which it is not religion,
it does not possess and cannot exercise the influence we have described.
It follows that the Papist is denied the benefit of an influence morally
restorative and intellectually invigorating in an extraordinary degree,
to all the extent to which Romanism comes short of religion. But we have
already established that Popery is not merely a defective system of Christianity,--it
is a system antagonistic to Christianity. It not only, therefore, does
not possess the influence we have ascribed to Christianity, but it possesses
an influence of a directly opposite character. It tends as much to degrade
and pollute man's moral constitution as Christianity tends to elevate and
purify it; and where the one quickens, expands, and strengthens the intellect,
the other inflicts feebleness and torpor.

In proof of the vast intellectual quickening which Christianity always
brings along with it, we may appeal to the state of the heathen world.
The various nations of the earth occupy places on the intellectual scale
ranged according to the proportion in which the elements of religion are
retained among them. First come the more remote tribes, to whom the existence
of a God is scarcely known, and whose mental powers scarce suffice to enable
them to count ten successive numbers; next come the Hindoos of India, conspicuous
alike for the grossness of their religious system and their utter intellectual
and moral prostration; next in the intellectual scale come the various
tribes of Western Asia, whose faith is Mahommedanism; then the popish nations
of Southern and Western Europe; then the semi-popish nations of Northern
Germany; and last of all, and very much in advance of all the others, are
the Protestant nations of Britain and America. As is the religion of a
people, the Bible being the standard according to which we judge of religion,
so is the intellectual development and the social advancement of that people.
This order obtains over all the earth. It cannot be regarded as a mere
coincidence. To regard it as such would be not less unphilosophical than
to regard as a mere coincidence the connection between stinted food and
a dwarfed body, or that other connection which is found to exist in all
ordinary cases between sufficient aliment and vigorous physical powers.
A fact of such universal occurrence must necessarily have birth in some
great and universal law. Neither climate, nor race, nor government, can
solve the phenomenon. Solutions have often been attempted on one or other
of these principles; but there are innumerable facts which defy solution
on all of them, and which are soluble only with reference to the influence
of religion. Not to mention other instances, we find in the very heart
of the Mahommedan empire a small Christian society,--the Chaldeans of the
Kurdish mountains. Their lovely and well-cultivated valleys, their clean,
thriving villages, their pure morals, and cultivated manners and tastes,
form a striking but most agreeable contrast to the barbarism, the sloth,
the filth, and the vice, that on all sides surround them. They are under
the same climate and government as their neighbours: in one thing only
do they differ from them, and that is their religion. Thus, in all circumstances
the influence of Christianity is the same. Here we find it, though existing
in a very imperfect state, creating a very oasis of beauty in the midst
of the waste wilderness of Mahommedan idolatry.[1]
And, to come nearer home, we have in Britain a striking fact standing in
direct antagonism to the theory which resolves all these great national
diversities into influence of race. We have the Celts of Ireland and the
Celts of Scotland standing at the very antipodes of the moral and social
scale. But we have not only the proof from analysis; the proof from direct
experiment is equally conclusive. All our missionaries declare, that when
Christianity is brought to bear upon the native mind of India, it brings
a striking intellectual change along with it. Even where it stops short
of conversion, it elevates the man from the mass of his countrymen: even
where it does not bestow the heart of the Christian, it bestows the intellect
of the European. There is a visible quickening and expansion of all the
powers, intellectual and moral.[2] The
vast transformation which Christianity wrought on the islands of the Pacific
is well known. She found these islands the abode of cannibalism, and she
made them the home of the moral and industrial virtues. In short, what
clime or tribe has Christianity visited where she did not bring in her
train all the elements of terrestrial happiness?

If, as a wide induction of facts establishes, the religion of the Bible
is by far the most powerful agent in quickening the intellect, and starting
nations in a career of progress,and if, as we have already proved,
Romanism is not the religion of the Bible, it follows that Romanism is
devoid of this life-dispensing power. But further, if Romanism be a system
the spirit of which is antagonistic to the religion of the Bible, as we
have shown it to be, it follows that its influence on the mind of man is
antagonistic also,--is as pernicious and destructive as that of religion
is wholesome and beneficial. We might safely rest the matter, as regards
the influence of Rome, on these general grounds; but we shall go a little
into particulars, and show, first, from the doctrines, and, second,
from the practice, of the Church of Rome, that the practical tendency
and working of the system is ruinous in no ordinary degree.

We take first the doctrine of infallibility. Can anything be conceived
more fitted to crush all intellectual vigour than such a doctrine? As an
infallible Church, Rome presents her votaries with a system of dogmas,
not a few of which are opposed to reason, and some of them even to the
senses. These dogmas are not to be investigated; the person must not attempt
to reconcile them to reason, or to the evidence of his senses; he must
not attempt even to understand them; they are simply to be believed. If
he demands grounds for this belief, he is told that he is committing mortal
sin, and perilling his salvation. Here is all action of the mind interdicted,
under the highest sanctions. The person is taught that he cannot commit
a greater crime than to think; that he cannot more grievously offend against
his Creator than by using the powers his Creator has endowed him with.
Thus, while the first effect of Christianity is to quicken the intellect,
the first effect of Romanism is to strike it with torpor. She inexorably
demands of all her votaries that they denude themselves of their understandings
and their senses, and prostrate them beneath the wheels of this Juggernaut
of hers. While the Protestant is occupied in investigating the grounds
of his creed, in tracing the relations of its various truths, and in following
out their consequences, the mind of the Roman Catholic is all the while
lying dormant. As the bandaged limb loses in time the power of motion,
so faculties not used become at length incapable of use. A timid disposition,
an inert habit, is produced, which is not confined to religion, but extends
to every subject with which the person has to do. His reason is shut up
in a cave, and infallibility rolls a great stone to the cave's mouth.

Not less injurious to the intellect is the doctrine of absolute and
unreserved submission to ecclesiastical superiors. If the former afflicts
with mental imbecility, this deals a fatal blow to mental independence.
The Church issues her command, and the person has no alternative but instant,
unquestioning, blind obedience. He acts not from the power of motive, but,
like the beast of burden, is urged forward by the rod. Here are the two
prime qualities of man destroyed. The one doctrine robs him of his strength,
the other of his freedom: the one makes him an intellectual paralytic,
the other a mental slave. To this double depth of weakness and servility
does Popery degrade her victims.

The leading idea of Popery as a scheme of salvation is, that the sacraments
impart grace and holiness,--the opus operatum. It is hard to say
whether this inflicts greater injury upon the intellectual or the spiritual
part of man. It injures vitally his spiritual part, because it teaches
him not to look beyond the sacrament and the priest: it substitutes these
in the room of the Saviour. The intellectual part it no less vitally injures:
it cuts off that train of mental action, that intellectual process, to
which the gospel so naturally and beautifully gives rise, by joining works
with faith, the sinner's own efforts with the grace of the Spirit. Under
the system of Popery, not a single quality or disposition need be cultivated;
not the reason and judgment, for the Papist is forbidden to exercise these;
not the power of sustained and patient effort, for all for which the Christian
has to pray, and labour, and wait, is in the case of the Papist conferred
in an instant, in virtue of the opus operatum: his power of self-scrutiny,
his self-denial, and his self-control, all lie dormant. Here are the noblest
and most useful of the moral and mental faculties, which Christianity carefully
trains and invigorates, all blighted and destroyed by Popery. The very
idea of progress is extinguished in the mind. The man is stereotyped in
immobility. He is given over to the dominion of indolence, and shrinks
from the very idea of forethought and reflection, and effort of every kind,
as the most disagreeable of all painful things. These qualities the man
carries with him into every department of life and labour; for he cannot
be reflective, persevering and self-denied in one thing, and slothful,
self-indulgent, and devoid of thought in another. Need we wonder at the
vast disparity between Papists and Protestants generally? When called to
compete with another man in the field of science or of industry, the Papist
cannot, at the mere bidding of his will, call up those faculties so necessary
to success, which the evil genius of his religion has so fatally cramped.

Faith is one of the master faculties of the soul. It is indispensable
to strength of purpose, grandeur of aim, and that indomitable persevering
effort which guides to success. But faith Popery extinguishes as systematically
as Christianity cherishes it. She hides from view the grand objects of
faith. For a Saviour in the heavens, who can be seen only by faith, she
substitutes a saviour on the altar. For the blessings of the Spirit, to
be obtained by faith, she substitutes grace in the sacrament. Heaven at
last is to be obtained, not by faith on the divine promise, but by the
mystic virtue of a sacrament operating as a charm. Thus Popery robs faith
of all her functions. That noble power which descries glory from afar,
and which bears the soul on unfaltering wing across the mighty void, to
that distant land, teaching it in its passage the hardy virtue of endurance,
and the ennobling faculty of hope and of trust in God,--lessons so profitable
to the intellect as well as to the soul of man, has under the Papacy no
room to act. In the room of faith, Popery, as is her wont, substitutes
the counterfeit quality,--credulity; and a credulity so vast, that it receives
without hesitation or question the most monstrous dogmas, however plainly
opposed to Scripture and to reason.

In short, Popery teaches her votaries to devolve upon the priesthood
the whole responsibility and the whole care of their salvation. The well-known
case of the late Duke of Brunswick is no caricature, but is simply a plain
and honest statement,--though not such, we admit, as a Jesuit would have
given,--of the real state of matters in the Romish Church. "The Catholics
to whom I spoke concerning my conversion," says the Duke, when assigning
his reasons for embracing the Roman Catholic religion, "assured me
that if I were to be damned for embracing the Catholic faith, they were
ready to answer for me at the day of judgment, and to take my damnation
upon themselves,--an assurance I could never extort from the ministers
of any sect in case I should live and die in their religion." Thus
the Church teaches her votaries that religion is entirely dissociated from
morals; that it is to no purpose for one to put himself to the trouble
of cultivating any one moral or spiritual quality--to no purpose to deny
one's self any gratification, however sinful; that one may live in the
flagrant violation of every one of the commandments of God, provided only
he be obedient to the commandments of the Church; and the sum and substance
of the Church's commandments is, that he practise a ritual associated with
no act or feeling of the soul, and which produces in return no spiritual
effect, and that whenever he fails in this somewhat monotonous and dreary
task, he be ready with his money to pay for masses and indulgences. Thus
the very first principles of morality are struck at. But the point we meant
to bring mainly into view here is the habit of mind thus produced, which
is that of sitting still, and leaving all which it belongs to one to do,
to be done for him by others. This is fatal to the energy, not less than
to the morality, of the man. It teaches him the needlessness of effort;
it extinguishes the principle of self-reliance, and teaches the duty of
divesting one's self of all care and forethought,--a habit of mind which,
when acquired in the important matter of salvation, is sure to be carried
into other and interior departments of life. It would form a curious subject
of enquiry how far the feeling which leads Roman Catholics to lean so decidedly
upon the priesthood for the life to come, is akin to that which leads them
to lean so decidedly upon governments, and so little upon themselves, as
respects the present life. The fiat of a priest, without any labour of
theirs, can give them heaven, with all its happiness: why should not the
fiat of a statesman, without any labour of theirs, be able to give them
earth, with all its enjoyments? We have only to transfer their modes of
thinking and their habits of action on the subject of religion, to matters
of this world, and we have the woeful picture of sloth, and decay, and
want of forethought, which Roman Catholic countries almost uniformly indicate.
The internal powers of the individual Catholic lying undeveloped and running
to waste, form but the type of his country lying neglected, with all its
rich resources locked up in its bosom, because the poor popery-stricken
man has neither skill nor energy to develop them. The one is more than
the type of the other: they stand related as cause and effect.

Such are the characters whom Popery is fitted to create: such are the
characters it does create. Every noble faculty it chills into torpor and
death. The understanding of the man lies crushed beneath the dogmas of
his Church: his independence is overborne by an infallible priesthood:
his very senses are blunted; for Popery judges it unsafe to leave her miserable
victims in possession even of these, and therefore she systematically outrages
them in some of the more awful of her mysteries. And conscience, which,
did the moral sense survive, might rise in its strength, and rending asunder
these fetters of brass, set free the intellectual powers, Popery drugs,
by her horrid opiates, into a death-slumber. A more pitiable and hopeless
condition it is impossible to imagine. The man is divested of almost all
that is distinctive of man. He becomes a mere machine in the hands of Popery.
He trembles to assert his manhood. And these unreflective and slavish habits
are inwrought into the very being of the man by daily iterations, and they
attend him in every avocation of life, proving a certain source of failure
and mortification.

Of the practice of Popery, as tending to degrade, we shall have
a more legitimate opportunity of speaking when we come to exhibit the influence
of Romanism upon society. And as regards the influence of the system upon
the religious character of the man, we have so fully entered into this
already, when discussing the several dogmas of Popery. that we do not here
return to it.

[1] For a most interesting account of these Christians,
see Layard's Nineveh and its Remains, vol. i. pp. 147-173. [Back]

[2] The following anecdote, than which nothing could
better illustrate our subject, the writer has from very excellent authority:--Not
long since, Dr. Duff was in Manchester prosecuting his grand mission. In
company one day with some of the great cotton-spinners of the place, the
conversation turned on the subject of cotton. The company were expressing
the desirableness of growing cotton in our Indian possessions, instead
of importing it from America. "You must first Christianize India,"
said the doctor. "Why?" it was asked. "Because cotton does
not grow in India beyond the line of Christianity," replied the missionary.
"What possible connection can there be between Christianity and the
growth of cotton?" "There is this connection," replied the
doctor, "that Christianity gives the faculties to cultivate it, of
which the Indian in his native state is destitute." [Back]